Ghosting in Online Dating | Consonance (Gleichklang)

Ghosting in Online Dating: Why It Happens and How Consonance (Gleichklang) Counteracts It

Ghosting is a symptom of modern online dating:

On mainstream dating apps, we are flooded with an almost endless number of profiles, scrolled through in seconds, briefly rewarded with matches, and then just as quickly dropped again. The result is weak bonds, declining willingness to commit, and a pattern in which people increasingly become interchangeable options. Ghosting is thus normalized, regarded as legitimate, passed on cyclically (those who are ghosted begin ghosting themselves), and leaves many people with frustration, insecurity, and ultimately dating burnout.

Consonance does exactly the opposite:

We have designed our platform from the ground up so that ghosting is not systematically encouraged, but structurally made more difficult. No gamification, no unlimited swiping mechanisms, no free profiles with unclear motives. Instead: a deliberate focus on people who are seriously searching, a transparent monetization principle without selling additional contacts, psychological education, and a genuine slow dating principle. With us, the goal is not to keep you in the dating loop for as long as possible, but for you to actually find a partner, friendships, or communities.

If this approach speaks to you, we will be glad to help make your search for a relationship successful:

See for yourself and join us: ➨ SIGN UP NOW!

If you would like to learn even more about the psychological background of ghosting and how Consonance specifically counters it, you will find all the details in this detailed foundational text. We would be happy if you shared it on your social networks or with friends who are also looking for a real alternative to the superficial routines of modern dating.

The Psychology of Ghosting: Why People Simply Withdraw

By now, there is a whole psychology of ghosting, and a considerable number of studies have examined why people ghost. I have already written a detailed article on our relationship blog that presents these findings in detail. Another article discusses a Consonance survey on reactions to experienced ghosting and motives for one’s own ghosting.

Here, however, I mainly want to provide an overview, for which I draw on the excellent master’s thesis by Lena-Maria Heinzle:

• Heinzle shows that ghosting can arise from normative factors, in which ghosting is understood as a completely legitimate and accepted way of ending contact. Although many people understandably experience ghosting as disrespectful, there are increasingly more people who normalize it and no longer evaluate it critically.
• Another aspect of Heinzle’s findings concerns ghosting as self-protection and ghosting as a way to reduce uncertainty, with both processes being closely related. In such cases, people do not ghost in order to be disrespectful, but because they themselves are psychologically burdened by fears of being hurt, experience high uncertainty that they cannot tolerate, or feel inhibited about giving a direct rejection.
• Another central finding of Heinzle is the cyclicality of ghosting, characterized by the fact that people who are ghosted are more likely in the future to ghost others themselves. This cyclical process arises through the previously mentioned aspects of normative expectations, operating via normative legitimization, self-protection, and uncertainty reduction. Those affected themselves have the experience of being ghosted and may then develop the view that ghosting is acceptable because everyone does it.

Why Dating Apps Systematically Encourage Ghosting

For my article here, aimed at people looking for a partner online and especially relevant to Consonance, the most central aspect of Heinzle’s findings is the promotion of ghosting by dating platforms:

• Online dating in its current form makes it possible to access many people very quickly and enables fast communication processes, but at the same time it promotes superficiality and makes it enormously easy for people to end contact completely. A profile is blocked or deleted, or the individuals even leave the dating apps themselves.

People ghost because ghosting seems normal, because they can easily use it to relieve themselves or reduce uncertainty, or because they learned it cyclically after having been ghosted themselves and now use this as their standard.

With dating apps, there is the additional factor that they tend to create weak bonds, produce overload through parallel interactions, encourage superficial communication, have people scroll through profiles and pictures in seconds, and replace the actual goal of looking for a partner with the goal of collecting matches.

In other words:

• The logic of dating apps, and also of most other modern dating systems, is to build interactions quickly and superficially, yet these interactions are weak in commitment. But if interactions are weak in commitment, it is only natural to end them just as quickly as they arose.

What is especially destructive is that, through our use of dating apps and other modern dating systems for partner search, we learn to end processes through ghosting. We then transfer this tendency from the dating app as a whole to our general way of handling contact.

Three Negative Factors in Modern Online Dating

At least three broader aspects of modern online dating actually have an almost triggering effect on ghosting:

• Choice overload: Modern dating apps promise a virtually unlimited number of possible contacts. Unfortunately, empirical research shows that growing contact opportunities are associated not with declining but with rising rates of singleness. Through choice overload, we make worse decisions and ultimately become helplessly exposed to a non-transparent system.
• Declining willingness to commit: When we are exposed to choice overload and at the same time constantly hope that an even better profile might come along, our willingness to commit declines. We decide in favor of a person and to enter a partnership with them when we feel that the investment is worthwhile. However, our decisions also depend on alternatives, and if apparently better alternatives exist, we will not decide to begin a relationship. The permanent hope for still better profiles mediated by the platforms therefore leads to declining willingness to commit. In fact, psychological findings even show that purely imagined alternatives immediately reduce our willingness to commit.
• Free profiles: Free profiles lead to an influx of less serious people who have goals very different from partner search. In online dating, the paywall is a crucial barrier, one that is mainly crossed by those who are genuinely and seriously looking for a relationship. Others are often not truly interested, want to invest little, or are motivated by a desire for stimulation and distraction, self-validation, trend-following, purely erotic contacts or flirting, browsing pictures, or even dating fraud and love scamming.

These three factors lead to us often feeling helpless in dating:

• We become overwhelmed and burdened, cannot separate the wheat from the chaff, get lost in apparent possibilities, and as a result our genuine interest in exploring the possibility of a relationship with one person, entering into contact, and beginning to build a relationship diminishes. As a result, the possibility of ending things through ghosting becomes enticing.

And there is yet another side effect:

The structures of modern online dating especially attract people who show dark tetrad traits of personality: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. These are precisely the people more likely to seek short-term contacts and who also stand out more often for deception, catfishing, manipulation, and sexual assaults. You can explore this topic in more depth in my article “Dark Tetrad: How Machiavellianism, Psychopathy, Sadism, and Narcissism Operate in Online Dating”.

Consonance (Gleichklang) as an Anti-Ghosting Dating Platform

This is what we do at Consonance to counter ghosting and promote finding a relationship:

Only People Seriously Looking for a Relationship

In modern dating systems, we move within a pool marked by pronounced heterogeneity of motives. Those who are seriously looking for a partnership communicate with those who may only be seeking self-validation or short-term distraction, for example.

The basic principle of modern dating systems is many options and parallel interactions, which, as we already know, lowers willingness to commit. Against this background, Consonance focuses on bringing together only those people whose wish for a relationship is serious and who are correspondingly willing to do something for it. Because Consonance has no free members, our number of members is greatly reduced, but the quality of the pool in terms of dating is raised even more strongly. By restricting ourselves to those who are seriously looking for partnership or friendship, parallel interactions decline and the number of potential alternatives decreases.

In this way, Consonance can implement the basic principle of successful dating, which does not consist in constant comparison and parallel interaction, but rather in the fact that one day a suitable person comes into view, both recognize that moment, and both seize the opportunity to actually build a relationship together.

Comprehensive Psychological Information

But we do even more to counter ghosting as a quasi-normalized process in dating apps and other modern dating systems:

• We inform our members through psychological blog articles, psychologically grounded videos, and the informative content on this website. We offer member support that is also available by phone at any time.
• My book “A Perfect Match? Online Dating from a Psychological Perspective” provides many additional forms of guidance.
• Finally, members can work with me in one-on-one video coaching on personal issues and improved approaches.

All of this is part of Consonance, and in this way we foster a basic attitude among our members that is the opposite of ghosting.

Avoiding Gamification

Another point that should be mentioned is that at Consonance we avoid every game-like logic or gamification of dating:

Gamification means that quick actions are carried out that are rewarded in the short term, creating a certain kind of fun and excitement. In modern dating apps, for example on Tinder, this gamification already exists in the swiping experience. Users thus begin to perceive themselves as interchangeable options, which prevents feelings of commitment. Everything appears easy and fast. But the ultimate reward, namely success in dating, slips out of view, and other intermediate rewards such as attractive profiles or matches take its place. As people now orient themselves toward these short-term goals, they are led away from the long-term goal of actual dating.

With regard to ghosting:

• We can start games at any time, but we can also stop them at any time without fundamental ethical principles or inner dissonance standing in the way. The more dating becomes a game, the more likely players are to use ghosting to end contact.

Slow Dating as a Deliberate Alternative

By consistently removing all elements of gamification at Consonance, we enable our members to maintain their focus on the real goal of their dating, namely finding a partner. In this way, dating at Consonance becomes slow dating:

Time passes in which little happens. This creates a kind of boredom in which the opportunity for dating actually emerges. Because anyone who understands dating as entertainment is drawn into the pull of gamification, with declining willingness to commit, permanent dating, and continued ghosting.

The boredom at Consonance therefore means that there is the prospect that one day a person will truly come into view and we will then be ready to make contact and explore the possibilities of a relationship.

Anyone who embraces this process of slow dating and the absence of all short-term rewards has a strong chance at Consonance of ultimately receiving the ultimate reward, namely a partnership.

According to our experience, this happens on average after about two years of dating. Many find someone sooner, while many others need a longer time.

A Transparent Monetization Principle Instead of Addictive Mechanisms

By the way, there is another aspect at Consonance that greatly reduces the likelihood of ghosting, and it relates to our monetization principles:

• With many dating systems and dating apps, it is common to sell more contacts, more visibility for one’s own profile, and therefore ultimately more matches. In fact, this is the business model of dating apps. Their business model is thus based on maximizing short-lived interactions, scrolling through profiles, choice overload, and declining willingness to commit, which leads not a few people into dating burnout.

At Consonance, by contrast, we have a completely different and fully transparent monetization principle:

• We charge all our members a fair annual fee that is also socially scaled, and once it is paid, all Consonance functions can be used. The annual fee is completely independent of the number of suggestions or communication processes. There is no possibility with us to sell additional suggestions and thereby enter into the gamification process.

Our Path to Relationship Happiness

By removing all the elements at Consonance that promote ghosting and therefore acting almost as an anti-ghosting dating platform, we are not taking an especially easy path, but a difficult one. It is no coincidence that all dating apps and other dating systems have chosen structures that make ghosting easier:

• Monetization principles that promote superficiality, addictive dynamics, and short-lived interaction are the best method for achieving the highest possible revenue.

Expectations that people bring into dating have also strongly shaped dating apps as they exist today:

• People expect many contacts, fast contact opportunities, endless profiles to scroll through, and believe that this is precisely a sign of quality.

A large part of our work at Consonance therefore consists in educating people about the actual principles of the psychology of dating and online dating, including showing that scalable and normalized ghosting is the symptom of a lack of attachment fostered by modern dating systems, something we want to oppose at Consonance.

If you can relate to these reflections and feel addressed by them, we would be glad to support you soon at Consonance in your partner search or in your search for friendships or communities:

See for yourself and join us: ➨ SIGN UP NOW!